SunFire X4150 Strange Drive Behavior
Posted by Sam
We got a couple of SunFire X4150s at work to replace several aging P4 servers. This was the first time I've used Sun equipment in a pretty long time and I'd never setup a Sun x86 server before. For the most part it went pretty smooth but we spent a long time chasing a strange problem. Since I didn't see anything online about it I thought I would explain the problem and what we did to resolve it.
The SunFires we ordered had a total of 5 drives. Four drives were installed at the factory and the fifth was installed by us. When we booted up the machines the first four drives all had green lights indicating they were good to go. The fifth drive had no lights what so ever. If you jumped into the StorageTEK **cough** Adaptec **cough** raid controller you could see and initialize the fifth drive. It's green light would light up and you'd think all was well. Until you rebooted it that is. Once you rebooted it the green light would disappear and wouldn't come back on until you reinitialized it. Sun was little help. Their support folks were friendly and responsive but ultimately we stumbled across the answer on our own. Below is the basics for upgrading the RAID card with the latest version. This fixed the problem for us so hopefully it will help you as well.
- Boot from SunFire X4150 Server Tools and Drivers DVD Version 2.1
- cd firmware\sst
- flash.bat
- Update flash image
- Follow the prompts and reboot when instructed
Comments
about 23 hours later Robert LaRusic said
Hi Sam, Glad to hear that worked out in the end. Nice blog site too.